Monthly Archive for June, 2005

Submerged in the mire of obligation for the past three days–during which interim I have suffered, suffered horribly, a Barton Fink-caliber writer’s block, and crammed some truly awful noises into .aiff files for the amusement of these people–this morning I decided to briefly eschew the drum machine for a peek at the good old blog. Lo, and I did perceive this comment:

Hi, like the blog. Some quick questions: 1) Is this the patriarchy’s fault, too? 2) Am I, as a man, by default a member of the patriarchy? 3) Is it therefore my fault? 4) And I’ve always wondered, if the answer to the two above questions is ‘yes’, is there a female group known as the ‘matriarchy’ by which you are, by default, a member? 5) That last quote there – "Oh, the humanity!" – shouldn’t that be more like, "Oh, the womanity!". Or "Oh, the huwomanity!" I’m being driven wild, wild I tell you, because I do not know the answers!

TimT’s hilarious comedy jokes do not obscure from my trained eye the expression of some common misconceptions about patriarchy-blaming. He assumes that it is a battle between the sexes. He speculates that The Patriarchy is a kind of club to which anyone with a dick belongs. And I detect in TimT’s tone the whiff of surmise, however faint, that I blame men.

I blame the patriarchy.

Well, I suppose it is possible that I have been remiss in my duties, and that perhaps half an iota or so of the blame for the confusion rests upon my weary shoulders. Let’s face it; I have omitted to prominently display a definition of patriarchy anywhere on the blog. I had assumed–rashly, it turns out– that I preach primarily to the choir.

I’d forgotten for a moment that feminists are required to waste at least half of their waking hours reassuring skittish fans of the status quo that we aren’t man-hating nutjob conspiracy-theorists.

Until such time as I have the leisure to more adequately address this pressing issue, kindly accept that when I deploy the term “patriarchy” I am alluding to “The Establishment” or “the global megacorp,” or, as the excellent Mimbreno of The Other Dark Meat more accurately suggests, “the dominant culture.” This broad characterization of patriarchy makes it easier to blame it for everything.

Patriarchy does not mean men. Seriously. Look it up.

White chicks on dope: the author delivers the rawk at the Side Door, St. Louis, ca.1997. Not pictured: 138 stinkin-drunk audience dudes in ironic T-shirts, imagining us in a 3-way

Reader Ellie, perturbed by some patriarchy-blaming remarks I made in connection with of one of her favorite bands, the Ramones, writes to ask the musical question: do I consider any kind of rock music appropriate for a feminist?

No. Yes. No.

OK, how about this: whatever music appeals to you is appropriate (although maybe, just on principle, draw the line at the Teen Fluffer’s Union Jug Band).

I would, however, urge the feminist consumer of popular culture to take a gander at the tiresome misogynist subtext underlying the whole rock ethos. My premise is that pop music does not exist in a vacuum, so, like painting or literature or history, it necessarily absorbs the hegemony of the larger culture, which happens to be a woman-hating culture.

The riot grrls took a valiant stab at it–because goddammit chicks can too rock, assholes!–but the thing is, they were merely infiltrating an existing paradigm; the models of rockstardom and sexgod cockworship were slightly retooled to accommodate women performers, but this was not, to my mind, so much an "authentic" women’s art form as it was girls rockin’ out according to a male code (this is a common rockdude criticism of the riot grrl school, but I don’t mean it dismissively; there was no other conceivable outcome, and besides, that shit was a blast. Unlike Ellie, who would rather "gouge out [her] eardrums" than listen to a riot grrl band, I got a big bang out that whole dealio, viz. my all-girl punk band, circa 1997).

I contend that there can be no authentic women’s culture as long as we, no matter how brainy or talented, are judged first and primarily on how we measure up as sexbots. Furthermore, for a woman to appreciate rock’n'roll, she must enter into a state of sympathy with the oppressor, temporarily agreeing to the terms and conditions of modern sexism. Any euphoria we experience at a rock show is purely vicarious, because our culture sees us as variants of normal, we are not invited to life’s rich pageant, and we’ll never know how it really feels for the world to be our oyster.

So, to answer Ellie’s question, a feminist’s enjoyment of rock’n’roll pretty much depends on her tolerance for pain. Let’s face it: rock’n’roll is sort of about rebellion, but it’s mostly about sex, and sex, in our culture, is about the sublimation of the male boner.

Stingray, forced against her will to pose with the super dorky Giant Stevie Ray Vaughan at Town Lake in Austin, 2003. It’s a good thing she’s in Ecuador, because when she sees this, she’s gonna want to kick my ass.

My bosom pal Stingray, the notorious hippie punk jetsetter, has been yukking it up in Ecuador and Peru and, I think, Botswana for a few months now. She files this report from Quito about the unexpected consequences of obtaining a butchie coiffure in Latin America:

Yesterday I went with my friend Ana to get a hair cut, and it was a little more eventful than I’d expected. 

My flaming fag friend Alexis is a hairdresser, and told us we could both come into his salon to get cuts.  So, after a trip to this museum I had been wanting to see, we headed over to the salon.  Full of women wanting bleaching jobs to look like some white Baywatch chick, we were a little frightened. (Needless to say, bleach doesn’t exactly take on black hair, so half the city is running around with orange do’s.) 

Alexis came prancing over to us and sat us in a chair for consultation.  By the way, did I say it’s not normal for women to have short hair here?  And not even fathomable for one woman to want a short punk-style, much less two. As he started our cuts a group began forming outside to see the weird boy-girls do fucked up things to their hair.

Feeling a bit on display, it came time for my turn and the crowd continued to grow. The owner began looking worried and said that it was bad for business and to hurry up and finish.  I almost had to beg my way into getting a trim on my neck.  The answer kept coming as, "We don’t do that for a woman’s cut.“  Even my friend Alexis just didn’t quite understand why I would want my hair that way.  We quickly paid and pushed our way through the mob only to meet the local metro filled with people practically falling over each other to get a look.  Half of the men here do the long, flowing hair thing, but women have absolutely no room to move.

I am tiring a bit from being stared at all day, everyday, all the fucking time.  Not as though that doesn’t happen in the states, only slight differences.  What’s weird to me is that I don’t think I look all that strange. 

Only her radiologist knows for sure. Left: real. Right: fake.

A recent Dutch study comparing (heterosexual) female and male brain activity during orgasm is today’s hottt sexxx headline at the major news outlets. Surprise! The study found “striking differences”! Surprise again! Though the research includes findings for both sexes, the focus of the reportage is on the bizarro female results, with the inevitable conclusion that the groundbreaking 411 will be useful to men in honing their mad fucking skillz.

God forbid a study of female orgasm should fail to add to the male repertoire!

In skimming Google on the subject, I found that in 5 out of 9 news articles women’s brains are variously described as “shutting down” or “switching off” during orgasm. The ultimate male fantasy–the brain-dead sexbot–vindicated by science at last! Of course this terminology is both inaccurate and absurd, since an actual brain shutdown would necessarily result in loss of consciousness, if not death. I don’t know about you, but if I ever lost consciousness during sex it was due to boredom, not orgasm.

[What the study actually found was that parts of the female brain that process the fear reaction were deactivated during orgasm. The researchers’ astonishing deduction? That “if you are fearful, it is very hard to have sex.” Of course, no headline read “Women Can’t Come When They Fear For Their Very Lives.”]

The remaining 4 articles I read did not omit to emphasize the weird unfathomability of women’s brain function, but added their particular delight in the intelligence that a brain scan can “spot women faking orgasms.”  Gotcha!

“Women can imitate orgasm quite well,” quoth one of the male researchers, “but there is nothing really happening in the brain.”

You wish, asshole.

The study failed to address the connection between fear and orgasm faking.